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Twice in 10 months, driving rainstorms sent the Kickapoo River rushing over its banks, drowning the town in butterscotch-colored slime. Each time, scores of residents fled.
No one died in either flood, but nearly 60 homes had substantial damage.
Reminders are everywhere. Watermarks ring buildings. Home after home stands empty.
Village officials estimate 30 to 45 homes are vacant and dozens of people have left. Charley Preusser, editor of the local Crawford County Independent and Kickapoo Scout newspapers, estimated about 120 people may be gone — about a fifth of the population.
A long-term recovery committee has worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state to come up with a plan.
Part of it calls for getting FEMA and state dollars to people who want to elevate their homes or sell them to the village so they can be demolished. Another component includes buying land within the village limits, but outside the flood plain. The idea is to give residents who take buyouts dry space to rebuild as well as attract new residents.
“We’re trying to build this town for our future,” said committee member Dietrich Smith. “I’m done getting my feet wet, and I want to take as many people with me as I can.”
FEMA officials are scheduled to present a final plan to the village. But residents are wary.
Some fear the government will seize their land. Others say they’ll never get enough money for their homes to be able to buy a new one. The median home value in Gays Mills was only about $61,000, according to the 2000 census.
Still others say the village will end up a weird collection of isolated, elevated homes and sparkling subdivisions up Hwy. 131.
“It’s going to look like a prize fighter who’s lost half his teeth,” said Christopher Smith, owner of Blackhawk Auto on Main Street.
One thing is certain. In another year, Gays Mills won’t look like Gays Mills.
Steve Mickelson, a planning committee member who grew up here and now owns Mickelson’s Market and Meats on Main Street, said something must be done or Gays Mills could vanish.
“You go back on some of these side streets and look at some of the vacant homes and it’s just depressing,” Mickelson said. “If we don’t do something, we’re just slowly dying.”
Most businesses on Main Street still are open, although the Backwoods Bar & Grill and the Peppermint Springs furniture store have closed. Scenic Rivers Energy Cooperative, which provides power to rural Crawford County, plans to shutter the garage and office it has occupied on Main Street since the 1940s and move to higher ground north of town.
“When you’re here at night, when you’re here in the winter, when it gets dark at 4 p.m., there’s no one,” said the Rev. Pam Lojewski, pastor at the village’s Lutheran church. “It’s an aging, dying community to start with, and then you put us under 4 feet of water twice ... why would you stay here?”
A transplant from suburban Chicago, Lojewski said it was tough living in a small town before the floods. She has since turned to antidepressants and a psychologist, and tells her congregation it’s all right to do the same.
“The people I’m talking to are not OK,” Lojewski said. “We have suffered way too much loss.”
Village at a glance
Gays Mills got its start in 1847, when James B. Gay built a sawmill on the Kickapoo below steep, forested ridges and bluffs about 50 miles southeast of La Crosse.
The town claimed 625 people in the 2000 census. It touts itself as the Apple Capital of Wisconsin, playing off the orchards that cap the surrounding ridges. The village looks like any other small town, complete with a Main Street barber shop, grocery store, tavern and gas station. The only distinctive features are an industrial park north of town, the river and the bluffs, which offer stunning vistas and peaceful isolation.
The people here are far from rich. The 2000 census reported the village’s median household income as $29,250, nearly $15,000 less than the state’s median income. About 11 percent of its families were in poverty in 1999.
